My rants, raves and occasionally humorous views of Life, Liberty and especially the Pursuit of Happiness.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Junk Mail

I get about 7 to 10 pieces of what I consider to be Junk Mail (snail mail) per week.Most of the unwanted solicitations are for Credit Cards, re-financing a Mortgage or switching my Auto Insurance.They are all telling me that their deal is better than the other guys.

Number one, I haven’t had a credit card in nearly 25 years and won’t have one.My bank has given me a Platinum Visa Debit Card which works just fine.No annual fees, no APR, and no chance of exceeding my spending limit.Plus it has all the benefits of using a regular Visa credit card.

Number two, I have no mortgage and, at this point in my life, I don’t care to have another one.I will say that they are throwing some great percentage rates at me. Even my bank has solicitations included with my monthly statements.

Number three, is Auto Insurance. I’ve used the same company for years. My car is 15 years old, so I now only carry liability and pay $550 per year for insurance. This seems to me to be an outrageous amount for a person that has never had an accident or filed a claim for over 35 years.

Getting back to the point of this post!

A lot of Junk Mail comes with prepaid return envelopes. What I do is cut up the ads from the Sunday newspaper and place them in the envelope and return them to the sender. You can also send an empty prepaid envelope back to the sender.

What does this accomplish?

The USPS will take in more money, and if all of us did this, a first class postage stamp would not be costing us 39 cents as it does today and probably 42 cents next year. The company’s sending out this unsolicited mail may realize that it is not economically sound for them to do so, therefore less Junk Mail.

10 Comments:

Bob D said...

The fact of the matter is that it is the "junk mail" that pays the major part of the cost of running the USPS. If it were not for "junk mail", the cost of mailing a 1st class letter would not be a measly $0.39 or $0.42, but more in the area of $1.50 - $2.00.

And let's not forget the fact that "junk mail" provides a lot of jobs in this country.

If you don't like junk mail, then throw it in the trash, OR you can expend a little effort and ask to be removed from all mailing lists.